Friday, November 9, 2007

Show & Tell is hosted by CanadaGirl - check out her blog for all the participants today, or join in!

Today I'm going to share a bit about our church's youth center, known as The Vault. Our church is in a very small community in a rural area, and a few years ago had the opportunity to purchase a property across the street from the main church building. This property had been a small branch bank, closed after a bank merger. For awhile we used the building as extra Sunday School space - with most of the built-in bank furniture still in place. Unfortunately I don't have any "before" pictures. The intention was to remodel the inside of the building, and turn it into a youth center, especially for our Wednesday night youth program which had really outgrown the Sunday School rooms it was using at the time. When we finally had all the permits, funds, and plenty of volunteers, the building was transformed, and the youth program was able to move into its new facility.

Last year I started working as an adult leader at the Vault, so this is my second year. We've also got a new Sunday evening program that we call Vault Extreme. New this year also, are the Vault t-shirts, which have this logo:

This is what the inside of the Vault looks like:

We have a small stage area for the worship band. Over to the left you can see the small billiards table, and partially hidden behind the wall on the right is the foosball table. Now let's add some people:

I took that picture on Wednesday night, before the majority of the kids had arrived. Last year we averaged around 50 total attendance on Wednesdays - this year we have averaged about 70 so far! And a large number of our Wednesday night teens are not from our church families.

Here is the kitchen area:

A large screen TV was donated, so we can watch videos and DVDs, and there is a game console as well.

And yes, the actual vault is still there:

We're trying to figure out how we can put it to practical use. So far all we've come up with is to lock up troublesome teens, but not sure that would be wise...